The winners of Startup Weekend Bangkok – the Infinit Closet wardrobe-sharing-app team – have taken their pitch global with their entry into the Global Startup Battle 2012.
Voting is on now, and you and anyone you know can vote once a day until the competition closes on November 27, to select 15 teams to enter the final round. After that, it’s up to a jury.
And what does this homegrown team – Wichaya ‘Maprang’ Sirasupparoekchai, Chayanin ‘Poon’ Sripob, Pongpeera ‘Art’ Chawalathawat and Songpon ‘Tull’ Buasathit – stand to gain if their creation wins the battle? Tens of thousands of dollars worth of stuff to help them get on with business, that’s what (see ‘Winnings’ below).
Infinit Closet is the brainchild of Maprang, a 27-year-old graduate of Thammasat University’s Master’s in Marketing program (the other team members are in their final year of the same program), who brought up the idea to the group shortly before Startup Weekend Bangkok, which they won two weeks ago.
So what is Infinit Closet? The group describes it as “the platform that allows girls to join closets with their friends and make the circle of fashion bigger”. The group aims to develop a website and mobile application to allow women – not exclusive, gentlemen, but targeted toward women – to create their own ‘virtual closet’, allowing friends to browse their wardrobes and select what they’d like to borrow for the evening.
This, the team said, allows women to spice up their wardrobe without splashing out the fliff… it’s free! Poon, one of the team members, said there may even be a delivery option developed in the future – we shall see.
Although the idea was created only two weeks ago, the Infinit Closet foursome have some ideas about how an application like this could be monetized. One is obvious: advertising. Another is a bit more ingenious – think Amazon.com: “If you’re looking through your friend’s virtual closet and can’t really find anything you like, the application could make suggestions for purchases [from other outlets] based on the fashion sense in the virtual closet you have created,” Maprang said.
The team has already purchased the www.infinitcloset.com domain, which is under construction, and aims to begin beta testing early next year in hopes of rolling out its product by mid-summer 2013.
Click here to cast your vote for Thailand’s only representative in the Global Startup Battle.
Winnings:
– a free trip to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, for the Global Entrepreneurship Congress;
– a free trip to San Francisco, USA, to tour Googleplex and meet with founders, mentors and investors;
– a US$5,000 in-kind PR launch package;
– $5,000 worth of design services;
– $5,000 incorporation and legal package; and
– $20,000 worth of Google Cloud services.
